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Climate change processes pose significant challenges to development in cities across West Africa. These processes shape and mediate urban vulnerability across urban areas and hinder wider development efforts across these cities. This paper reviews these emerging perspectives within the context of UN-Habitat's work in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso and Saint-Louis, Senegal. It argues that policy-makers and researchers need to engage with issues of climate change and development at an urban scale and across “ordinary cities” through exploring the range of vulnerabilities inherent in each city. Specifically, the paper illustrates the diversities and similarities of climate change processes that exist across these two medium sized, or ordinary West African cities, the intersections with existing economic profiles and potential impacts and the emerging urban governance responses to these issues. It demonstrates the need to move beyond constructions of an archetypal “West African” city, and illustrates the emerging work by UN-Habitat and local partners in developing localised knowledges about urban vulnerabilities and the multiple and divergent ways in which these issues are beginning to be addressed.

Climate change processes pose significant challenges to development in cities across West Africa. These processes shape and mediate urban vulnerability across urban areas and hinder wider development efforts across these cities. This paper reviews these emerging perspectives within the context of UN-Habitat’s work in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso and Saint-Louis, Senegal. It argues that policy makers and researchers need to engage with issues of climate change and development at an urban scale and across ‘ordinary cities’ through exploring the range of vulnerabilities inherent in each city. Specifically, the paper illustrates the diversities and similarities of climate change processes that exist across these two medium sized, or ordinary West African cities, the intersections with existing economic profiles and potential impacts and the emerging urban governance responses to these issues. It demonstrates the need to move beyond constructions of an archetypal ‘West African’ city, and illustrates the emerging work by UN-Habitat and local partners in developing localised knowledges about urban vulnerabilities and the multiple and divergent ways in which these issues are beginning to be addressed.

This paper examines the notion of “carbon literacy practices” through reporting on a small research project aimed at understanding how children make sense of climate change, and their subsequent related practices at school, at home, and in the community. Drawing on a background in New Literacy Studies (e.g. Barton et al 2000; Satchwell & Ivanic 2009 and 2010), the paper explores the relationships among children’s understanding of climate change, their literacy practices in relation to climate change, and their environmental social practices.\ud Data is included from a project involving children and their families from three primary schools – with and without “eco-school” status, which asked: What and how do children learn about climate change at school? What and how do they learn at home and outside of school? How do these kinds of learning relate to each other, and how is what they learn put into practice? Put simply, how might children become “carbon literate” citizens? This article will report on the methodological challenges of the project and the use of some innovative methods to address these using mobile technologies. \ud In addition, the paper interrogates the notion of children as agents of change. The concept of children influencing the behaviour of others sounds convincing, but is based on a straightforward model, described by Shove (2010) as the ABC model – which is considered an effective strategy in health care (stopping parents smoking) and in marketing (persuading parents to buy certain products), but is not necessarily transferable to other contexts. Further, it is clear from work in literacy studies and education (Ivanic et al 2009; Gee 2003; Reinking et al 1998; Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom 2003) that the transfer of linguistic and semiotic signs is by no means equivalent to the transfer of knowledge, values or functions. In other words, a school lesson or a computer game about climate change and its effects does not automatically mean that a child will turn the lights off at home. The paper considers these issues with reference to qualitative data collected from observations, conversations on “Twitter”, focus groups, and individual interviews.

This paper characterises climate change as a “transformative stressor”. It argues that institutional change will become increasingly necessary as institutions seek to reorientate governance frameworks to better manage the transformative stresses created by climate change in urban environments. Urban and metropolitan planning regimes are identified as central institutions in addressing this challenge. The operationalisation of climate adaptation is identified as a central tenet of a comprehensive urban response to the transformative stresses that climate change is predicted to create. Operationalisation refers to climate adaptation becoming incorporated, codified and implemented as a central tenet of urban planning governance. This paper has three purposes. First, it examines conceptual perspectives on the role of transformative stressors in compelling institutional change. Second, it establishes a conceptual approach that characterises climate change as a transformative stressor requiring institutional change within planning frameworks. Third, it reports emergent results and analysis from an empirical inquiry which examines how the metro-regional planning regime of Southeast Queensland has responded to climate change as a transformative stressor via institutional change and the operationalisation of climate adaptation.

The work represents a first attempt to evaluate the progress of UK Local Authorities in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Supported by the EPSRC, the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Improvement and Development Agency, the work helped inform LGA policy as evidenced by the authoring (by Fleming and other IESD staff) of LGA Research Briefing 19 “Climate Change, a Survey of Local Authorities” (see http://www.lga.gov.uk/Documents/Publication/climatechange.pdf). The 2007 LGA Climate Change Survey (see http://www.lgar.local.gov.uk/lgv/aio/38100) draws heavily on the work in the paper. Fleming is an advisor to the LGA. Allman, the lead author of the paper, was an RA in the IESD managed by Fleming. Wallace is a PhD student supervised by Fleming.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has rapidly risen to prominence in the last two years, but in part because of the group’s meteoric rise, there are relatively few academic analyses of it. This paper draws on collective-action framing theory to examine the engagement of one XR group–XR Norwich–with notions of climate justice. Drawing on ten in-depth interviews conducted in mid-2019, it argues that despite general concern for the global South, XR Norwich members mostly framed climate change in terms more reminiscent of mainstream environmental policy makers, rather than the radical climate justice movement. This raises questions about the extent to which XR Norwich engages their members on climate justice concerns, whether XR Norwich is more concerned with generating appeal instead of offering radical solutions, and whether such a strategy might lead to factionalism within the broader XR movement.

Institutions are influential in mediating the impact of adaptation initiatives at the local level, yet there are disconnects between the goals of multi-scale planning initiatives and community priorities. Research to address this challenge primarily focuses on reform to formal institutions in environmental governance. Meanwhile, knowledge of the specific role informal institutions play in governance processes remains limited. This study increases understanding of the interactions between informal institutions and adaptation using a case study of the Native Village of Wainwright on Alaska’s North Slope. Qualitative contextual analysis was employed to identify patterns of informal institution and adaptation associations in historic and contemporary situations in Wainwright. The Adaptation Institutional Analysis Framework developed in this paper extends Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework and is used as a tool to analyse and describe these dynamics. Four primary findings resulted from this analysis (1) identification of informal institutions that have a bearing on adaptation to environmental change and adaptive capacity in Wainwright, (2) insight into how the identified institutions relate to each other and to different aspects of local adaptation, (3) identification of changes in informal institutions that have occurred over time and the potential implications of these changes for local adaptive capacity, and (4) potential opportunities to leverage knowledge of informal institution and adaptation relationships in targeted formal initiatives. The outcomes of this study contribute to an improved understanding of the function and potential of informal institutions in adaptation processes, the benefits of which extend beyond the local context of Wainwright.

Sea level rise (SLR) caused by climate change presents challenges for public planners all over the world. In this study, practical challenges and ethical factors in adaptation to SLR were identified based on interviews with planners in Sweden. Six challenges were identified: lack of knowledge and human resources, lacking integration and coordination, lacking or insufficient frameworks for dealing with long-time-horizons, responsibility for implementation and financing, and goal conflicts in the process of implementing adaptation policy. These challenges are then developed into a typology of ethical factors that are of particular importance for adaptation to SLR, categorised as input-oriented, process-oriented and outcome-oriented ethical factors. The challenges and ethical factors identified in this paper are the first step taken towards answering the question of what a sustainable and ethical adaptation to SLR in the context of local and regional policy-making could look like. QC 20210507 Sea-rims

This paper explores how Australia's Indigenous peoples understand and respond to climate change impacts on their traditional land and seas. Our results show that: (i) Indigenous peoples are...

Community-led initiatives are commonly advocated as an effective way of encouraging individuals to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Since 2008, the Scottish Government's climate challenge fund (CCF) has distributed over £50 million in grants to community-led, carbon-saving projects across the country. Drawing on participant observation within two CCF organisations in remote rural Scotland, this paper examines the assumption that the receipt of government funding is necessarily of overall benefit to community-led initiatives attempting to facilitate more sustainable communities in the long term. Observations indicate that funding can bring with it a number of significant complications to community-scale action as a result of: (i) misaligned output timeframes, (ii) administration demands, and (iii) local competition. It is concluded that the design of funding schemes can in fact hamper the full potential of grassroots initiatives to engender more sustainable lifestyles throughout the community.

Scholars have recognized a climate gap, wherein poor communities face disproportionate impacts of climate change. Others have noted that climate change and economic globalization may mutually affect a region or social group, leading to double exposure. This paper investigates how current and changing patterns of neighborhood demographics are associated with extreme heat in the border city of Juárez, Mexico. Many Juárez neighborhoods are at-risk to triple exposures, in which residents suffer due to the conjoined effects of the global recession, drug war violence, and extreme heat. Due to impacts of the recession on maquiladora employment and the explosion of drug violence (since 2008), over 75% of neighborhoods experienced decreasing population density between 2000 and 2010 and the average neighborhood saw a 40% increase in the proportion of older adults. Neighborhoods with greater drops in population density and increases in the proportion of older residents over the decade are at significantly higher risk to extreme heat, as are neighborhoods with lower population density and lower levels of education. In this context, triple exposures are associated with a climate gap that most endangers lower socioeconomic status and increasingly older aged populations remaining in neighborhoods from which high proportions of residents have departed.

As new forms of governance for climate change emerge in African cities, will they enable emancipatory and socially progressive transformations or will they exacerbate existing inequality, poverty and vulnerability patterns? This paper presents one of the case studies developed by UN-Habitat Cities and Climate Change Initiative in Maputo, Mozambique. The case analyses first, the production of urban vulnerabilities under climate change, and second, the existing governance arrangements for climate change in the city. Building on the lessons of the case study, the paper argues that to ensure that new forms of climate change governance lead to socially and environmentally just outcomes climate change interventions should, at least, meet two conditions: first, they should consider the close interactions between social and ecological elements and, specially, how patterns of urban inequality interact with environmental factors; second, they should recognise the opportunities in African cities through a broad noti...